“Ever hear of Chad Bolling?”
“Sure. He promotes a lot of publicity for himself.” Coney looked at me anxiously. “You really going in for the poetry kick, Mr. Archer? With music?”
“I have long yearned for the finer things.”
Such as a good French dinner at a price I could pay. I took a taxi to the Ritz Poodle Dog, and had a good French dinner. When I finished eating, it was nearly ten o’clock.
The Listening Ear was full of dark blue light and pale blue music. A combo made up of piano, bass fiddle, trumpet, and drums was playing something advanced. I didn’t have my slide rule with me, but the four musicians seemed to understand each other. From time to time they smiled and nodded like space jockeys passing in the night.
The man at the piano seemed to be the head technician. He smiled more distantly than the others, and when the melody had been done to death, he took the applause with more exquisite remoteness. Then he bent over his keyboard again like a mad scientist.
The tight-hipped waitress who brought my whisky-and-water was interchangeable with nightclub girls anywhere. Even her parts looked interchangeable. But the audience was different from other nightclub crowds. Most of them were young people with serious expressions on their faces. A high proportion of the girls had short straight hair through which they ran their fingers from time to time. Many of the boys had longer hair than the girls, but they didn’t run their fingers through it so much. They stroked their beards instead.
Another tune failed to survive the operation, and then the lights went up. A frail-looking middle-aged man in a dark suit sidled through the blue curtains at the rear of the room. The pianist extended his hand and assisted him onto the bandstand. The audience applauded. The frail-looking man, by way of a bow, allowed his chin to subside on the big black bow tie which blossomed on his shirt front. The applause rose to a crescendo.
“I give you Mr. Chad Bolling,” the pianist said. “Master of all the arts, singer of songs to be sung, painter of pictures, hepcat, man of letters. Mr. Chad Bolling.”
The clapping went on for a while. The poet lifted his hand as if in benediction, and there was silence.
“Thank you, friends,” he said. “With the support of my brilliant young friend Fingers Donahue, I wish to bring to you tonight, if my larynx will permit, my latest poem.” His mouth twisted sideways as if in self-mockery. “It ain’t chopped liver.”
He paused. The instruments began to murmur behind him. Bolling took a roll of manuscript out of his inside breast pocket and unrolled it under the light.
“‘Death Is Tabu,’” he said, and began to chant in a hoarse carrying voice that reminded me of a carnival spieler. He said that at the end of the night he sat in wino alley where the angels drink canned heat, and that he heard a beat. It seemed a girl came to the mouth of the alley and asked him what he was doing in death valley. “ ‘Death is the ultimate crutch,’ she said,” he said. She asked him to come home with her to bed.
He said that sex was the ultimate crutch, but he turned out to be wrong. It seemed he heard a gong. She fled like a ghost, and he was lost, at the end of the end of the night.
While the drummer and the bass fiddler made shock waves on the roof, Bolling raised his voice and began to belt it out. About how he followed her up and down and around and underground, up Russian Hill and Nob Hill and Telegraph Hill and across the Bay Bridge and back by way of the Oakland ferry. So he found the sphinx on Market Street cadging drinks and they got tight and danced on the golden asphalt of delight.
Eventually she fell upon her bed. “I’m star-transfixed,” she said. He drank the canned hell of her lips, and it went on like that for quite a while, while the music tittered and moaned. She finally succeeded in convincing him that death was the ultimate crutch, whatever that meant. She knew, because it happened she was dead. “Good night, mister,” she said, or he said she said. “Good night, sister,” he said.
The audience waited to make sure that Bolling was finished, then burst into a surge of clapping, interspersed with bravos and ole’s. Bolling stood with pursed lips and absorbed it like a little boy sucking soda pop through a straw. While the lower part of his face seemed to be enjoying itself, his eyes were puzzled. His mouth stretched in a clownish grin:
“Thanks, cats. I’m glad you dig me. Now dig this.”
He read a poem about the seven blind staggers of the soul, and one about the beardless wonders on the psycho wards who were going to be the gurus of the new truth. At this point I switched off my hearing aid, and waited for it to be over. It took a long time. After the reading there were books to be autographed, questions to be answered, drinks to be drunk.
It was nearly midnight when Bolling left a tableful of admirers and made for the door. I got up to follow him. A large girl with a very hungry face cut in in front of me. She attached herself to Bolling’s arm and began to talk into his ear, bending over because she was taller than he was. He shook his head. “Sorry, kiddie, I’m a married man. Also I’m old enough to be your father.”
“What are years?” she said. “A woman’s wisdom is ageless.”
“Let’s see you prove it, honey.”
He shook her loose. Tragically clutching the front of her baggy black sweater, she said: “I’m not pretty, am I?”
“You’re beautiful, honey. The Greek navy could use you for launching ships. Take it up with them, why don’t you?”
He reached up and patted her on the head and went out. I caught up with him on the sidewalk as he was hailing a taxi.
“Mr. Bolling, do you have a minute?”
“It depends on what you want.”
“I want to buy you a drink, ask you a few questions.”
“I’ve had a drink. Several, in fact. It’s late. I’m beat. Write me a letter, why don’t you?”
“I can’t write.”
He brightened a little. “You mean to tell me you’re not an unrecognized literary genius? I thought everybody was.”
“I’m a detective. I’m looking for a man. You may have known him at one time.”
His taxi had turned in the street and pulled into the curb. He signaled the driver to wait:
“What’s his name?”
“John Brown.”
“Oh sure, I knew him well at Harper’s Ferry. I’m older than I look.” His empty clowning continued automatically while he sized me up.
“In 1936 you printed a poem of his in a magazine called Chisel.”
“I’m sorry you brought that up. What a lousy name for a magazine. No wonder it folded.”
“The name of the poem was ‘Luna.’”
“I’m afraid I don’t remember it. A lot of words have flowed under the bridge. I did know a John Brown back in the thirties. Whatever happened to John?”
“That’s what I’m trying to find out.”
“Okay, buy me a drink. But not at the Ear, eh? I get tired of the shaves and the shave-nots.”
Bolling dismissed his taxi. We walked about sixty feet to the next bar. A pair of old-girls on the two front stools flapped their eyelashes at us as we went in. There was nobody else in the place but a comatose bartender. He roused himself long enough to pour us a couple of drinks.
We sat down in one of the booths, and I showed Bolling my pictures of Tony Galton. “Do you recognize him?”
“I think so. We corresponded for a while, but I only met him once or twice. Twice. He called on us when we were living in Sausalito. And then one Sunday when I was driving down the coast by Luna Bay, I returned the visit.”
“Were they living at Luna Bay?”
“A few miles this side of it, in an old place on the ocean. I had the very devil of a time finding it, in spite of the directions Brown had given me. I remember now, he asked me not to tell anyone else where he was living. I was the only one who knew. I don’t know why he singled me out, except that he was keen to have me visit his home, and see his son. He may have had some sort of father feeling about me, though I wasn’t much older than he was.”